The League of Night and Fog (16 page)

His penis began to fail once more. She moaned in what seemed genuine disappointment. She’d been the one to suggest making love this afternoon; he wondered if there was still a chance to salvage his marriage.

The phone call, Rosenberg thought. When would that damned call come through? The truth was, if it weren’t for his wife’s expensive needs, if it weren’t for his own need to impress her, he would never have allowed himself to become involved in the terrible risk that the call represented.

But what was the alternative? To confront his wife about her
affair?
If the scandal became public, honor would require him to divorce her, which he did not want to do. His wife was stunning, a descendant from Indian royalty. Apart from his pride in being married to her, she added to his attempt to look Mexican—his hair dyed black and combed straight back, his skin cosmetically treated to look swarthy, his eyes fitted with non-corrective contact lenses to make them look dark. He needed her to help him be a chameleon. And as for Esteban, the giant was too formidable a bodyguard for Rosenberg to feel safe without him during the present emergency.

His penis began to respond again.

The phone rang. He pulled away from his wife and lunged toward the bedside table.
“Hello?”

The male voice wasn’t Halloway’s, but it did have a southern Ontario accent, a vague Scottish burr. Rosenberg realized the sequence he was part of. Halloway had made an untraceable local call to a conduit, who in turn had used a secure phone to relay the message. “Maple trees.”

“Chaparral.”

“Be ready to talk in forty minutes.” A click concluded the call.

Rosenberg shut his eyes with a mixture of relief and nervousness. “I have to leave.”

His wife nuzzled him. “Right now?”

“I need to be somewhere in forty minutes.”

“How long will it take you to get there?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Ten minutes to wash yourself and get dressed. That still leaves …”

Five minutes. They were enough.

R
osenberg told his three bodyguards to wait outside in the car, entered a dilapidated building, hurried up its creaky stairs, and unlocked a room on the second floor.

The room was little more than a closet with a window. Except for a phone on the floor and an ashtray on the windowsill, it was empty. He rented it and paid the phone bill under the name of José Fernandez. The arrangement existed for one reason only—to provide a secure location where he could make and receive delicate long-distance phone calls without fear of leaving a trail.

In southern Ontario, he knew, Halloway had a similar safe phone in a similar office. As soon as Halloway had instructed his conduit to warn Rosenberg about the impending call, Halloway would have set out toward that office, just as Rosenberg had set out toward his. Rosenberg knew this because, if Halloway had been in place, he wouldn’t have needed a conduit; he’d have made the call directly. So circumstances had now changed sufficiently that Halloway refused to waste time calling Rosenberg from the safe phone, then waiting for Rosenberg to get to his. By using the conduit, Halloway was signaling that even the forty minutes it took him to reach his own safe phone were critical.

He opened his briefcase and removed an electronic device the size of a portable radio. He plugged it into a wall socket, checked its dial, and scanned it around the room. The device emitted a hum. If a microphone had been hidden in the room, the device would not only send but receive the hum that the microphone was relaying. The resultant feedback would register on the dial. But the dial remained constant. No hidden microphones.

Not satisfied, Rosenberg removed a second electronic device from his briefcase and used a clip to attach it to an eighth-inch section of exposed wires on the telephone cord. The device monitored the strength of electrical current in the telephone line. Because a tap would drain power, the strength of the current would automatically increase to compensate for the drain. The dial Rosenberg watched indicated no such increase in power. The phone wasn’t tapped.

He hastily lit a cigarette—a Gauloise; he hated Mexican tobacco—then checked his watch, the mate to his wife’s. The call
should come through in the next two minutes. If it didn’t, if he or Halloway had been detained, the agreement was to wait another thirty minutes and, if necessary, another thirty minutes after that.

He inhaled and stared at the telephone. When it finally rang, he grabbed it. “Aztec.”

“Eskimo.”

“I expected your call this morning. What took you so long to get in touch with me?”

“I had to wait till they left,” Halloway said, his acquired Canadian accent convincing. “It’s started. They’ll get there tomorrow morning.”

“Europe?”

“Rome. Everything points to Cardinal Pavelic. If they find out why he disappeared—”

“How long will it take them?” Rosenberg interrupted.

“How long? They’re the best. Their fathers were the best. It’s impossible to predict. The most I can say is they won’t take longer than necessary.”

“The
least
I can say is if we fail to honor our business agreement …”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Halloway said. “As if the Night and Fog isn’t bad enough, we have to worry about our clients.”

“Who
insist
upon delivery.”

“Our guarantees remain valid,” Halloway’s voice said. “I have confidence in Seth alone. But now that Icicle’s joined him,
nothing
can stop them.”

“I hope, for everyone’s sake, that you’re right.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll face two different kinds of enemies. Call our contact in Brazil. Tell him to arrange for delivery. Our clients are desperate enough to ignore the delay, provided we can assure them it’s safe to accept delivery, and I think we can do that now. If the enemy knew what we were doing, they’d have used that knowledge as a weapon against us weeks ago.”

“Or maybe the Night and Fog operatives are waiting for us to trap ourselves.”

“Soon the Night and Fog won’t exist.”

“I want to believe that,” Rosenberg said.

“We
have
to believe it. If Icicle and Seth can’t stop them, no one can—and in that case, we’re as damned if we go ahead with the shipment as if we don’t. So do it. Give the order. Send the merchandise.”

R
ome. The bored American, his back sore from slumping too many hours on an unpadded chair, gagged on a mouthful of bread, salami, and cheese when he realized what he’d just seen on the monitor. “Holy … !”

He dropped the remnant of his sandwich beside the can of diet Coke on the metal table before him and leaned abruptly ahead to stop the videotape machine.

“Come here! You’ve gotta see this!”

Two operatives, a man and a woman, turned in his direction, their features haggard from too many hours of watching their own monitors.

“See what?” the man asked. “All I’ve been doing is seeing—”

“Nothing,” the woman said. “These damned faces all blur together till they’re just dots on the screen, and then they’re—”

“Hey, I’m telling you. Come here and see this.”

The man and woman crossed the spartan office and flanked him.

“Show us,” the woman said.

The first man rewound thirty seconds of videotape and pressed the play button.

Dots on the screen became images.

“Faces,” the woman sighed. “More damned faces.”

“Just watch,” the first man said. He pointed toward airline passengers coming out of an exit tunnel into Rome’s airport. “There.” He pressed the pause button.

Minuscule lines furrowed over the face and chest of a man suspended in midstride about to enter the concourse. The man wore
a loose-fitting sports coat, an open-collared shirt, but his muscular chest and shoulders were nonetheless evident. His face was square and tanned, his eyes intelligent, his hair bleached by the sun.

“I wouldn’t kick him out of my sleeping bag,” the woman said.

“But would you still be alive after he’d screwed you?” the first man asked.

“What?”

“Just watch.” The first man released the pause button on the tape machine and pushed the play button. Other faces moved past the camera. Italy’s intelligence service had installed the system at every exit ramp in Rome’s airport, an attempt to improve security, specifically to guard against terrorists. After Italian specialists had watched, the tapes were released to other networks of various sorts, civilian, military, and political.

“Okay, who else should I notice?” the second male operative asked.

“Him.
Right here,”
the first man said and again pressed the pause button.

Another exiting male passenger froze in place, lines across his face and chest. Tall, thin, pale, red-haired, bleak eyes.

“Holy … !” the woman said.

“What a coincidence. Exactly what I said.” The first man straightened, his pulse speeding. “If you’ll check the mug shots of—”

“That guy’s—!”

“Cryptonym Seth,” the first man said. “As assassins go, they don’t get more scary. Except for …” He stopped the tape, rewound, and expertly stopped it again. “Take another look at …” Excited, he pressed play.

Again the blond muscular man stepped out of the passenger tunnel toward the camera.

“Yes … !” the second man breathed.

“It’s Icicle,” the first man said. “Fans, what we’ve got here is—”

“A reminder to pay attention,” the second man admitted. “Those bastards do show up, even if we get too bored to expect them.”

“And not just that,” the woman said. “We watch for days and days. Now suddenly we get
two
of them,
together
, trying to appear as if they’re traveling separately.”

“Or maybe each didn’t know the other was on the plane,” the second man said.

“Give me a break,” the woman said. “These guys are state of the art.”

“Okay, all right, I grant the point.”

“Which raises the question,” the first man said. “Did they know beforehand, or did they find out after the plane took off?”

“What’s the city of origin for their flight?” the woman said.

“Toronto,” the first man said. “So what went down in Toronto?”

“Nothing recently, so far as we know. Not even a rumor,” the woman said.

“So if they weren’t on a job there—”

“They must have met there, been sent from there.”

“Unless they both just happened to catch the same flight,” the second man said.

“With these guys, nothing’s accidental.”

“Maybe they’re working for opposite sides,” the second man said. “No, that’s no good. They didn’t look nervous getting off the plane.”

“Of course not. They’re professionals,” the woman said. “Unlike some of us.” She glanced at the second man, then turned to the first. “But the feeling I get—”

“Is they’re traveling together,” the first man said.

“They’re being discreet, but they didn’t try to disguise themselves; they don’t care if we notice. Something big’s going down, and they’re giving us a signal. It isn’t business.”

“Personal?” the woman asked.

“My guess is,
extremely
personal. They’re telling us, ‘we’re
here, we’re playing it open, we’re cool, so
you
be cool, this doesn’t concern you.’”

“Maybe,” the woman said. “But if you’re right, God help the target they’re after.”

S
t. Paul, Minnesota. William Miller stomped the accelerator of the Audi that had been left behind when his father disappeared four months ago. Despite his polarized glasses, the afternoon sun stabbed his eyes. His head throbbed, but not from the sun. He skidded around a corner, raced along his tree-lined street, and veered up his driveway, stopping so abruptly he jolted against his seat belt.

As he scrambled out, his wife ran frantically from the house and across the lawn.

“I had to meet with the city engineer,” he said. “When I checked in with my secretary …” Anger strained his voice. “Where is the damned thing?”

“The swimming pool.”

“What?”

“I didn’t see it when I had coffee on the patio this morning. Whoever did this must have waited till I left to play tennis this afternoon.”

She followed as Miller hurried past the flower beds at the side of the house. He reached the back and stood at the edge of the swimming pool, staring apprehensively down.

The swimming pool was empty. He’d been planning to have one of his construction crews come over this weekend and reline it before he filled it for the summer.

At the bottom, someone had used black paint, drawing a grotesque symbol whose borders stretched from end to end, from side to side of the pool.

His throat felt sandy. He swallowed before he could talk. “They wanted to give us time to think they’d gone away, to make us believe they were satisfied just to have taken my father.”

He made a choking sound as he stared at the symbol—large, black, obscene.

A death’s head.

“What the hell do they want?” his wife said.

He answered with a more insistent question.
“And what the hell are we going to do?”